Role of Western Media Still Questioned

By Madanmohan Rao. 23 March, 1995.

NEW YORK, Mar 23 (IP S) - Twenty years after developing countries
first called for a 'New World Information Order' (NWIO), Western
media are still being faulted for distorting and ignoring much
of the world around them.

Even as Western media have bolstered their domination of
global news, Western news content seems less and less
informative, according to critics, who range from Sebiletso
Mokone-Matabane, Co-chair of South Africa's Independent
Broadcasting Authority (IBA) to U.N. Secretary-General Boutros
Boutros-Ghali.

Speaking at an international media conference here this week,
Boutros-Ghali noted that press freedom should remain a priority
for the world body, but he pointed to serious shortcomings in
international media coverage.

In Angola, where the United Nations has been trying to end a
bloody civil war, more people have died than in all other
current U.N. operations around the world combined. Yet the
Western media have all but ignored the African nation, he said.

Similarly, El Salvador was covered extensively when its own
civil war was raging, but ''not much is reported on the (peace)
achievements since then,'' according to the U.N. chief.

While criticising media coverage of U.N. operations, however,
Boutros-Ghali was silent on the behaviour of member-states like
the United States, which virtually strait-jacketed the
international media during the U.N.-sanctioned Gulf War.

Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who also spoke
at the Columbia University Conference, agreed that press freedom
is essential. but, like much of the Western media, he added
that a free press can only co-exist ''with a free market''.

Not so, said fellow Canadian Gertrude Robinson, A McGill
University professor, who said she found this rhetoric about
free markets ''intensely troubling.''

''How can this one prescription fit the whole universe of
different realities in other governments?'' she asked. Market
criteria cannot fulfill the requirements of representativeness,
balance and social good, Robinson said.

Robert Macneil, a prominent news anchor for U.S. public
television, also said that market-driven owners of news
organisations do not uphold the public trust.

He decried the ''increasing blurring between entertainment
and news'' in commercial television. This is a direct
consequence, he said, of ''increased competition in the
marketplace,'' where people's appetites for gossip and
speculation have made entertainment -- not information -- the
big money earner.

However, Macneil stayed away from issues of bias and
prejudice in the western media, which have been documented even
in his own news programmes by media watchdogs like the New York-
based Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

These issues were raised forcefully, though, by speakers like
the IBA's Mokone-Matabane, who is also a member of the African
National Congress (ANC).

The Western media used to label the ANC and the Palestine
Liberation Organisation as ''terrorist organisations,'' although
that label seems to have suddenly disappeared, she noted.

Fumio Kitamura, managing director of the Foreign Press Center
in Japan, also agreed that labeling by Western media causes many
problems and that, as a result, many developments in Asia and
other regions are ''widely misunderstood'' by the West, he said.

For instance, during his posting in the Middle East, Kitamura
noticed that the Palestinian organisation Hamas originally began
as a grass-roots charity organisation, but the ''sheer
brutality'' of the Israeli forces led it to adopt different
tactic.

This chain of events is not adequately represented in Western
media, he said.

Much heated debate also revolved around the perceived role of
Western media organisations, given their global clout and reach.

Joseph Mehan, a former UNESCO official, criticised them for
not actively supporting principles like global peace and
cooperation which were part of a call by developing nations in
the 1970s for a NWIO to help bring about a more balanced and
representative global flow of news.

''This was widely misunderstood and condemned by the West,
and even today the arrogance of the Western media has not
changed,'' Mehan told IPS.

Western media's attempts to ''export'' their model of
organisation to other non-Western cultures -- a growing portion
of dwindling foreign-aid money, was also troubling to many
panelists from developing nations.

Despite the domestic problems that many developing nations
face, their people still hate being preached to by Western
nations, said Tunji Lardner, a journalist from Nigeria.